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Another potential leader is Deputy Premier Zhu Rongji, 67, the country's top economic official. Tough and able, Zhu is, like Jiang, a former mayor of Shanghai. He is generally popular with the rising class of entrepreneurs, but rampant inflation and the credit-squeezing policies he has used to tame it have created resentment across the country. Premier Li Peng, though he is still a major figure, is a widely disliked hard-liner and one considered unlikely to succeed. But there are other senior officials who might challenge Jiang, and secrecy in Beijing is so thick that some unheralded candidate could easily emerge.
To the outside world, which can do little but observe and speculate, the most important question is not who comes out on top in Beijing but what the winner stands for. All the potential leaders speak up for the continuation of Deng's reforms and the creation of a "socialist market economy." But there are differences among them--so far only hinted at--on how fast the country can be freed from the bonds of central planning, how much authority should be devolved to the regions, and how much pain and dislocation the society can take in the process.
All the rivals are preoccupied with the economy. They know their political future depends on sustaining growth and delivering prosperity, but they do not know how to achieve that without overheating the system and shaking up the society. At a party plenum that approved a new five-year economic plan in late September, Jiang seemed to be placing stability ahead of growth, saying, "Without a stable political and social environment, nothing can be done." He clings to price controls, and he allows banks to discriminate against private enterprises to favor state firms when providing credit.
He has also backed away from his announced intention to close or sell off China's 100,000 mammoth state-owned enterprises. Half are losing money, and many are unable to pay their workers, who have staged violent as well as peaceful protests in major industrial centers. The problem, a familiar socialist hangover, is that these factories employ about 109 million people and sustain what are essentially company towns, providing housing, education and medical care to their workers.
Instability on the largest scale could arise in the countryside, away from the booming cities and coastal provinces. The 800 million peasants who live in the hinterland enjoy ample food and decent housing but have little cash in a society that is increasingly based on money and consumption. Li Zenghua, an orange farmer in central Hunan province, scrapes by on $20 a month. Rich entrepreneurs, he complains, "spend the equivalent of my annual income in one night at the karaoke bar."
Frustrated on the land, peasants are doing what they have always done in industrializing countries--moving to the cities. So far, 100 million people have pushed into the coastal cities from the interior to chase the style of living they see on television. Beijing alone shelters more than 3 million people who drift from job to job and feed on their discontent. The national total for this "floating population" is expected to rise to 200 million over the next five years. Add millions of newly unemployed state-enterprise workers to the mix, and the results could be disastrous.